


The DEVOLUTION Heist

by CharlieGM



Category: BNA: Brand New Animal (Anime)
Genre: Action, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Angst, Animal Instincts, Animal Transformation, Character Study, Corporate Espionage, Dark, Detective Noir, Espionage, F/F, Fiction, Gen, Happy Ending, Heist, One Shot, Shapeshifting, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Swearing, TF, Thriller, Transformation, Weight Gain, feral tf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28746003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharlieGM/pseuds/CharlieGM
Summary: Marie Itami, hustler and beastman con artist extraordinaire, is tasked with infiltrating a secret pharmaceutical lab and stealing an existential threat to Anima City.  Features espionage themes, mature content, transformation and weight gain.
Relationships: Marie Itami/OC
Kudos: 5





	The DEVOLUTION Heist

Ōkubo Neighborhood, Shinjuku Special Ward  
Tokyo Prefecture  
22:38 Local time

A red horizon, sliding into the sicky grey of light-polluted space. Distant sirens. The harsh glare of neon street lamps. Immigrants, police, and native Japanese crammed in train stations and sidewalks, a culture under constant low boil. A place that prods its inhabitants like animals in cages.

It was better that they didn’t know beastmen walked among them.

Itami Marie slid through the crowd disgorging at Shin-Okubo-eki’s main platform, doing ‘the walking among them’ thing like she’d always known how. Step lively, but not too lively. Head pointed, direction sure. Act like you know the area; better if you already do. She wore a heavy coat for ambiguity among business men, and a turtleneck to bore prying eyes. Jeans were less common in Japan, but nevertheless one of the flags of the banal working class. Or worse, a bum on the street with nothing else to wear.

The image that Marie fostered said ‘I am unimportant’ in a lowercase mental font. Dark skin and mauve dreadlocks gave the statement a tangy bite. A localized ‘fuck off, you can’t handle me.’ Humans understood threat language just as well as animals did; it was simply contextualized in a different vocabulary and lexicology that fit their hubris as the dominant species. 

So Marie used it. She had places to be, identities to spoof, and dirty secrets to steal.

She brushed past a high school couple slowing down in front of the turnstiles, and then a troop of businessmen sharing cigarettes at the road’s edge, tapping out ash and casually shaming their wives. The station’s sign came and went overhead. She left its green shadow and joined Ōkubo-dori, the neighborhood’s clogged artery. Once she was on the crosswalk, swimming into a school of stressed human beings, anyone tailing her this far would have a difficult time finding her again. She made the effort to blend in deep and let the current of people pull her along.

It’s the first lesson any transient learns: to be discrete.

Ōkubo was one of Tokyo’s poor neighborhoods. Not a hard place to get lost in but markings - I.E. your clothes, your attitude, overall care - those made the beast. Under hanging Hangul and Hiragana signs, the people trafficking Ōkubo wore what worked. This wasn’t Shibuya or upper Shinjuku, the spotlights of Japan’s stage to the world, the place tourists flocked to find their fantasies. The most fashionable thing on pavement was a turban, courtesy of the Nepalese migrants. Old style fuku abounded. Salarymen wore tweed and rotting cotton over the cheapest button-ups affordable. As many men as women worked, and they radiated sweat and tiredness through bandannas and the multiplicity of costumes in the service industry.

A Toyota Century pulled past a compact diesel bus, briefly breaking the flow of foot traffic. Through tinted windows, Marie spied a wing-tipped old man in the back passenger seat, leering at the notion of driving through human chaff. He probably would have politely, but firmly demanded his driver to drive through the crowd if he could get away with it.

Pour a small one out for the common lot of the downtrodden. That wouldn’t be enough to make Marie drop the mask, though. No amount of sympathy was worth it.

The last thing a beastman wanted to happen in public was exposure. The second to last thing? Being followed. No one with good intentions tailed a beastman, that was a fact of nature If it wasn’t a gang of sociopaths, probably kids with selfish hearts and clubs (sport of their choice), it was the local police, looking to profile someone who shouldn’t be here. Which usually led to fines, detainments, trumped up charges, whatever stuck.

Not every cop held a prejudice against fur, feathers and scale, but that wasn’t license to let your guard down. 

The threat was always there, but somehow, even with a city-state to themselves, beastmen found reasons to leave Anima City and go back into Man’s world. Paycheck, obligations, moral compunction, denial…

Oh, you have money? The humans like you? That’s nice. Blow up on everybody’s phones, make an ass of yourself. Just be careful. There are a lot of prodding hands in the crowd.

Beastmen were oddities at best among humans. Gods at their peak, terrifying demi creatures at their worst, and uncomfortable truths in the median. Ignorance and bigotry ran together in bleeding colors, far past the point Marie could correct. In a way, she didn’t want to correct it. People assumed things about each other. They chose not to read through the lines, and who was Marie to tell them they were wrong? It was easier to convince a biased person that they’re right than challenge their convictions.  
Case in point: a government goon came around the corner in a hurry as Marie was crossing an underpass walk. They bumped, she palmed his wallet, and he was too wrapped up in himself to realize he was missing 7,300 yen and his building ID. Oops. More scratch for Marie. 

Small cons like that were easy. Tonight’s job was not.

Beastmen were politically problematic for humankind. A nascent minority that was everywhere, that had no particular sovereignty of their own. It was something of an open secret that nation-states were looking for nonlethal options to neutralize them. Assurances from the UN Security Council were, effectively, a wet towel for all the good it did. History had vindicated the beastmen rights movement, but not without significant struggle and needless death. 

Patterns of retaliation, the ways humans tried to conform beastmen, evolved as the movement took shape. War had proven unpopular in the modern century; lucrative, but bad for public relations. With the colonial wars in India and Algeria, the massacres in Oran all appetite to try to suppress beastmen violently went underground. The public backlash was too much to fight. 

But even so, politicians turned to subversive means as the Cold War dragged on. Spycraft and internal espionage through state arms, the many FBIs and Stasi who had a stake in hurting the movement. When that petered out by the 80s, and Anima City was being proposed with the tenuous support of the Japanese government, methods evolved again, into a new field: genetic engineering.

Humans and beastmen diverged on a cellular level. DNA and BNA were (supposedly) incompatible. This did not stop modern corporations from injecting capital into startups, looking for ways to play with that distinctive separation in nucleic acid. Starting in the very late 1970s, Raytheon, InGen, Haliburton and Mitsui began poaching talent from public universities, and from there, almost every multinational began developing biological divisions to breach the field, to possibly score a contract that targeted the shapeshifting beastmen. It was a problem in the 1980s, and it only got worse as the line between government organs and private bigots became too murky to parse. Rumors trickled in of chemical weapons and viruses created in secret workshops in the late 2000s, mostly unverified, but with enough frequency to make beastmen across the globe scared. 

The sobering reality was that pharmacological companies and tech giants were in the business of making anti-beastmen weapons. The evidence showed that testing happened, and happened frequently. Weapons were recovered - everything from nerve gas that targeted BNA to capture equipment of all makes and uses No nation wanted to claim that level of gross malfeasance with its own people. With this arrangement, laying responsibility at the feet of corporate structures, there was no direct culpability, no apparent links with conscious moves. It was all orchestrated with dark money, discrete in its terror, aligned in the interests of general, random hate. 

This surprised no one involved in beastmen politics. As the mayor of Anima City put it, any dominant culture will inevitably try to reshape the minority into something it can parse on its own terms. It took many forms, it morphed with time, but it was an axiom that emerged every generation or so. It applied across humanity as much as it did for beastmen.

Anima City’s existence was predicated on an alliance with the Japanese diet and a major pharmaceutical company - Sylvasta - to exist at all. At the seat of power, though, Mayor Rose and her loyal security wolf Shirou could keep an eye on the company from its memorial hospital headquarters downtown. Outside Anima City’s borders, beastmen needed ways to disrupt the corporate supply chain. If only to keep the moral depravity of the modern era from sinking any deeper into the mud. While Rose worked with Japan's politicians and the UN for a permanent solution to genetic profiteering, she hired thieves to do the same in secret.

Marie’s price tag was 400,000 yen. It was originally 200,000, but when Marie learned just what she was stealing, she demanded more. 

A consolidated multinational had set up shop in Shinjuku’s immigrant ward. Zhongma International, based in Shenyang, China. Tenuously attached to the economic bureau in its mother country, protected through shell companies in South Korea. Zhongma started a clinic on the northern edge of the ward in 2013, under the pretense of providing medical care for the Korean minority while treating congenital disease. 

This was a cover. The clinic owners gave forged documents to the local inspectors that fudged the intake numbers. Everything was a lie. Zhongma did half the business it said it was doing, yet owned the building space of the clinic from the ground floor down to three sub basements. Ōkubo may have been a neglected neighborhood, but a clinic running on limited revenue and initial investment could not afford to run private biohazard trucks in the dead of night to Yokohama port. This prompted Rose to call a mole in Shibuya to dig up information on Zhongma’s operation, and after tapping into their local network, she found something.

The Type-31 DEVO agent. It was designation-only, a chemical synthesized in a centrifuge from a dealer’s choice of heavy metals and organic compounds. The mole managed to get manifests of the materials coming into the clinic by truck, and only there found the drug they were going into. Cutting edge stuff. 

What’s more, there were fourteen beastmen among the intake who mysteriously disappeared days after the manifests were recorded. One at the time.

Mayor Rose had a lot of nerve to think her favorite con artist could get in and out of a clandestine laboratory, but Marie didn’t argue the specifics. Her task wasn’t beastman-itarian, so far as Rose or the mole could tell. Merely thievery.

The agent was powerful enough to pull beastmen from the clinic registry within a 15-30 minute window. Without any hard evidence in the file record of how the agent worked (on account of the company keeping private records off the internet and managing a paper trail that ended where prosecution could start), Rose leaned on Marie’s discretion. Her job was to sneak in through the ducts, bypass the security checkpoint, grab a sample, steal the chemical blueprint and dispose of the original documentation if possible. If not, make it out alive. 

Simple enough, Marie thought. Old school infiltration. This kind of job would cost the mayor, but no job that saved beastmen hide in the long run paid out in chump change.

She wondered, though, as she stepped onto an alley of ramen bars and laundromats. Was she a stereotype of her species? A salient question, since Rose picked her out to do this. Bulls were hot-headed morons, rabbits were flighty little nervous wrecks, bears were overindulgent, and minks? Wily, cunning, and too smart for her own good. Possibly greedy on top of that, all of which summed Marie Itami up to a tee. But it was still a little embarrassing to admit that she was one of the best beastmen for stealing things when minks, ermines and weasels were best known for stealing things out from under someone else’s nose like cheeky little bastards.

This job was certainly a cheeky one. Her first time as a spy.

Then again, the why of the job wasn’t just about money. She was flush with yen notes. Sure, she loved income like an otter loves clams, but if she lived through tonight, Rose’s bounty was going into the Flip family’s business for ‘reinvestment.’ Nowhere near her personal accounts. Cash was not something Marie wanted to have too much of, even if she loved the feeling of paper changing hands. It wasn’t shrewd to hold onto hundreds of thousands of yen as a thief, anyhow.

She expected Mayor Rose to have figured out that character quirk by now. No, Rose appealed to the thing in Marie that was decidedly un-Mink-like. Pride.  
Pride in her species, which came with a moral rictus.

If Marie Itami, a greedy gremlin mink no-name on the street, would go out of her way to rescue a no-name beastman out of solidarity, who else would you send? Another petty criminal with a bigger rap sheet? Get outta town with that. Marie might have been a hustler, but she was no opportunist. Plenty of beastmen were willing to sell out to corporations if it made them a bit more cash than the initial fee. Marie’s mother raised her better than that. If it was convenient to the cause of her own conscience, then doing good deeds was good currency.

Though that last rescue she did ended up being pretty expensive… that Kagemori girl nearly cost Itami her life just to make the crossing.

That reminded her; she needed something to eat before starting this debate up again. Some sort of alibi spent mulling around the building, but also, she was hungry, which would turn into a distraction if she didn’t take care of her body. She stopped at a ramen bar in view of the clinic, and scanned over the menu board absentmindedly.

“Duck special” she ordered. “To go.”

The chef at the bar nodded, column hat bobbing. A bowl was out in minutes. She found herself a spot two blocks away and sequestered to eat.

Along the way, she amended her introspection: she was one mink. Singular, one digit. A cunning mink, sure, but one mink in a sea of humanity. The only thing she could feasibly depend to go according to plan was the singular, one digit variable. Anyone else - a partner, dependent, ally or otherwise - was a chance taken that could easily get her between a rock and a baseball bat. The more she guessed her chances with strangers, the worse it often looked. 

This job in particular worked with her talents, but it wasn’t a rescue operation. Not that she saw. Whatever was happening inside that clinic removed its patients too fast to save anyone in the nick of time, like some kind of sentai hero. Rescue, as a job category was off-limits for her.

Why? Because sticking her neck out on this job was liable to get her killed. That was a mantra Marie could get behind. She stuck her neck out to get paid, not to fall into danger with someone she had to account for. Danger was danger, often violent. If she couldn’t control that danger, place herself in circumstances that were always winnable or retractable, then the odds would eventually put a bullet through her chest.

She wondered mildly if it was it guilt or an unwillingness to accept responsibility that screwed her cowardice to the sticking place. Maybe she was just hungry. Could’ve been the noise, the lights, the stress of being packed into a metropolis like sardines in a can. Any number of things activating that selfish instinct. Wasn’t her fault she was cagey and lonely... well, okay, there was a small possibility that it was her fault for choosing this life, but it wasn’t something Marie thought about deeply, or with much internal consistency.  
She found a place between poor apartments and slurped up duck ramen in the company of cats and trashbags. Chopped waterfowl helped slow her thoughts to a ruminating slump.

Whatever happens happens. Survive first, whine about it later.

“Hey cat-friends,” Marie asked her audience, “I’m not gonna finish this. Any takers?”

A tom cat mewled plaintively. His partner stared intently up at the mink. So, she split a piece of duck strip between them and licked her fingers while they made off with tonight’s dinner.

Marie left the plastic bowl on a gutted washing machine and looked for a way up onto the roof. The alley sat in a gully with high walls to either side, which meant at one time, the city government cared to install some kind of safety railing. She found a fire escape hiding in shadow. With a running start, she jumped and put out her arms to catch bars. The metal rattled like bones, but it held, and that was enough.

She shunted her spirit into her bones. Nails warped into clinging claws, with tufts of fur on their tips. A human would have to worry about leverage and the tension strength of their fingers, but a mink in the same position had the tightness of claws clenching into the steel for extra grip. One level beget another. She didn’t have to revert back to fur to lose weight. Marie was lithe enough, light enough already to slither her way to the edge of the roof. 

She kicked off at the top. Her claws dug into the opposing roof, and a running press on the overhang swung her body overtop. 

Infiltration was one part subterfuge, and three parts body coordination. She could engineer a reason to be somewhere once she was inside, and had a reasonable alibi. I forgot my keycard, I’m new. I missed that day of training. Something to that effect needled a whole in the system’s trust, but to actually get into a system, a thief had to be physically capable of finding new ways inside.

Don’t be afraid of heights. Put confidence in your grip. Leave your heels on the pavement.

She tracked in socks across the dim rectangle of the Arashi Grand Court building. Claws filed back down to nails as she crouched under aluminum tubing and balanced on shingles.

Old style architecture was easier for second-story work for one particular reason - the lighting. Nothing in Tokyo was older than 1945. One or two shrines survived the firebombing, but almost every neighborhood had to be rebuilt in the post-war years. This meant that most of the residential zoning in Ōkubo was built after that, somewhere in the 60s, and they weren't built to account for hanging neon signs. Critics at the time called them brutalist cubes, high-rises with brick and steel construction, because they were cheap, and brutal to look at. They weren’t designed to flow with the light pollution, since Tokyo was still recovering as an urban center. Daytime, anyone at street level could see the tops of these brutalist structures, but at night, the blare of neon and the noise of humming transformers carved out blindspots in the dark. They made cavities of shadow under candy pinks and oranges, drawing the eye, muffling sound. It was the right confluence of technology that made the mink a jaguar in a dark forest.

She made it across to her target in a crouch. The clinic’s second story roof was a steep drop from Arashi. Marie clung to the lip of the roof and climbed down the brick face with her claws out. She made a careful balance, sliding between windows and balconies while using the railings as her insurance from a direct drop, taking each foothold slowly. She had learned a long time ago not to use cables if she had to. She could be electrocuted, or worse, dropped onto the pavement.

Far enough, Marie felt confident enough to drop the rest of the way. Her feet absorbed the ‘thump,’ but Marie still hesitated. Wary of a handful of things she might have already done wrong. None of them materialized. 

Intel suggested there were cameras on the edges, and one facing the roof access door. She was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all exactly where they should be. CCTV wired; they were probably monitored by a workstation on one of the lower floors. It was too much of a gamble to predict if the night shift was actively watching, or if motion sensor alarms were attached to the camera lens. The plans didn’t specify either way, but the prospect deterred common thieves from trying the roof to begin with.  
Marie had another way in. Instead of trying to jimmy the lock and enter the right way, the way that was easy to turn into a bottleneck, she turned towards the chugging heating and air unit a few meters to the right of the roof access door. The next logical step. 

Now, most security contractors didn’t think to wire up air conditioning vents with fancy hardware. Motion-detecting equipment didn’t exactly fit inside an air vent - not unless the owners felt like calling maintenance for every false positive the scanners picked up. Rats and cockroaches were pests, but not burglars. 

Contractors didn’t think in that kind of paradigm anyway. Their ideas of security fell increasingly on the new bogeymen of the digital age - cyberattacks. Spoofing, email phishing, network breakings, heat signature tracking and authentication IDs were legitimate threats to worry about. Air ducts, the really big air ducts that let people about Marie’s size crawl around inside, were mostly aluminum, and very loud under the weight of an adult human being. It was commonly assumed that anyone paying attention would hear someone moving inside. The thing might even crumple in itself if the intruder was too heavy. Send the skulker careening to the floor, wake the whole building up.  
Marie loved little assumptions like those.

The lack of attention to the ducts exposed a serious flaw: they were vulnerable to shapeshifters, along with really lightweight people.

Marie grew a claw from her fingertip and used it to undo the screws on the grating. She let her body elongate, bristle with muffling fur. Her hands morphed. She extended out her paws one step at a time, and slowly crawled in. It was straight down for a handful of meters. The path bent at an L shape at the bottom, and extended horizontally above the second floor.

She caught conversation as she crawled. It came from underneath. Japanese at first, with a smattering of Korean, mostly women. Good nights from nurses. The steady pulse of heart monitors, the breathing of iron lungs and the hiss of oxygen tanks.

No Mandarin she could make out. The company hired native talent for its open operation at least.

The straight line dipped ahead, leading into a shoot. Nimbly, she fanned her arms out to the walls and pulled herself in a duct shaft. Another drop - this time, though, the ducts were headed down multiple floors. They spread like roots to feed the rest of the building with fresh air - and heat, which would’ve been a problem on a cooler night. 

Don’t look down. So sayeth Mrs. Itami.

Marie shimmied down the ventilator shaft. With her arms folded in, and her legs pitched at awkward angles, the journey took long, grueling minutes to finish. With only the company of echoes and her muscles complaining, it was even longer.

But eventually, she touched bottom.

Only touch. She put her foot out gently to test the soundness of the aluminum, to see if it could carry her weight.

It creaked… lightly. Good. Marie came down gently until she was level on her belly.

The first basement’s vent paths was split down a central avenue, with side rooms and storage forking off into ungainly limbs

She crawled forward, then right at the first junction. Medical storage B1A.

She flicked a claw back out to undo the screw bolts on the grating and carefully popped the molding off. She pulled it out, tucked it under her arm, slid her way out...

And landed on her heels. 

No klaxons went off. No suspicious movement outside. She stepped lively around stacked crates of gauze, cloaked in near darkness, and peered out into the hall. It was all clear.

She gave the doorknob a jiggle. The lock popped.

Clearly, the budget went to upgrading the server and closing it off from the outside world, instead of investing in something harder to break than a push lock. Marie kept a smarmy grin to herself.

She gave the floor ahead a scan before quietly stepping out. At this hour, the ground floor would be shutting down to the grave shift. Midnight truck departures indicated that the underground team worked either nightly or in round-the-clock shifts. In any event, once the main office shut down, any staff moving this direction were going to move through this specific hallway, which meant they were prey.

Despite everything separating Marie from her animal forebears, she still hunted prey. She just didn’t eat them, not in the traditional sense.

She palmed out the card in her back pocket and slid it under her sleeve. The mole was kind enough to spoof a Zhongma ID card for her. It wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, but the card was not a key. It didn’t have any authentication whatsoever. It was, in fact, a prop, which still gave it a function. The right props gave anyone the illusion of belonging there, as long as the wearer committed to acting like they were supposed to wear them.

Marie needed more than just a card though. A coat, some shoes...

She caught a voice coming around the corner, Japanese. Marie dipped into an alcove out of camera range and waited until the doctor was just in front of her to spring the trap.

“Hh-”

“Go to sleeeeeep-”

Marie pulled the lady in the lab coat into the dark, arm over her mouth. Surprise had her squirming, incoherent. She could fight it all she wanted, but Marie seized the moment, and she did not. All it would take is a half minute of a chokehold to gently put her to sleep...

And so it did. The doctor’s body fell limp in her arms.

“Good girl,” Marie mouthed.

She had the cops to thank for the technique. Police chief Tachiki pulled a few strings a couple months prior to teach her basic self-defense skills - which is to say, he invited her into the cadet academy and made her put an armadillo morph in a submission hold again and again until she got it right. 

The best practice was hard practice, he said. It was a busy afternoon.

Tachiki gave cops a better name than they deserved. But then again, he was a bloodhound, not a human. He knew the struggle beastmen faced, and elected to look the other way for people he knew worked for good causes.

Not that Marie made a habit of working for the Big Good. It just happened that Marie made herself scarce when things got ugly in Amina City, so she had a fairly good reputation. 

And maybe, like, two arrests tops.

Marie put herself to work disrobing the doctor. She took her victim’s lab coat, tapped out their ID card on the lanyard in their pocket, installed her own, and swallowed her nerves. She had to turn her mentality completely in the other direction. Smooth muscle control and demeanor, that was what she had to focus on now.

Marie stepped out into the halls and locked the door behind her - leaving Doctor Yamazaki behind on a pillow of medical gauze. She deserved to be comfy.

The Zhongma basement had an air of an eerie repose. An unnatural place, hollowed out of an earthquake shelter. It was lit in yellow-white fluorescence, drawing opaque shadows along the fringes. Her heels clacked limestone floors and her hands traced down walls pimpled with linoleum tile, the hallmarks of a place an architect designed once and forgot about. Marie could still see the remains of cigarette burns on the floor from ancient days

The only sounds down here were her own, and the drone of light fixtures. Other than that... 

The whir of a camera.

Marie gave it the mental stinkeye. 

It was a quick hike down a narrowing, winding set of concrete stairs to get to the second basement. The little joys of being agile. She came onto a space at the bottom, sheltered by two pillars, that opened up into a vast, cavernous zone.

This was the second basement floor. The plans indicated that floor was built out of an underground parking garage. It was significantly bigger in scope than the glorified hallway above, and there was a fair likelihood that the company didn’t want to rebuild the architecture underground to fit their plans. So, instead, a quick remodeling was done to turn it into a livable, septic space.

It didn’t feel livable, though. As she stepped away from the stairwell, heat hit her in the face. Marie felt like she was swimming in the air; something thick with something adjacent to dread.

It made sense. Air piping was confined to the first basement floor. The ground may have been cold, but given the number of machines Zhongma had running at any given time, heat built up into a solid miasma. It was trapped underground, and had nowhere to go.

Thankfully, Marie met a bundle of rotating fans on the landing, set up in a faerie circle. And past them, she saw an air compressor hooked up to the retaining wall, with a bank of servers as company.

They were watched, of course, by the sweatiest mallcop she’d ever met.

He noticed someone past his station like a drugged golden retriever noticing a ball was thrown his way. “OOhhh, I’m not slackin’,” he sputtered in Japanese. “I’m on duty, I swear.”

“Hi there,” Marie said brightly. “Could you help me?”

“I wish you’d help me, ma’am, it’s hoooot.”

Marie smiled, cupping her hands over thighs. “You been on watch all day?”

The mallcop peeled himself off the recliner behind his station and tried standing. He found it very dizzying. “Yeaaah. I’m s’pposed to be out of here in an hour, but…”

“But?” She hesitated. “Is it the shift change?”

“No, jus’ s’pposed to be relieved. We don’t do shifts no more.”

That was worrying. Marie wet her lips. The heat was already licking at her core. She’d be sweating in a minute if she didn’t hurry up. “Sorry to be a bother. I’m from Kagoshima U, Kitano Asuka? If you’ve heard of me? I was referred here from the head doctor, ah…”

“Mr. Ishii?”

Marie nodded. “That’s him, yeah.”

“Makes sense. Blughh, they’re hiring new people all the time.”

“Do you need to see my card?” Marie asked while keeping a distinct distance from the guard station. As she expected, the mall cop took off his cap and rubbed his forehead instead. It was too much effort in this heat.

“I can see it from here, you’re fine. You’ll want to go to third sub-basement. The research group is on recess, but you’ll find someone before trials start up again. Just look for anyone with primary clearance, ma’am, and they will help you with onboarding.”

Marie bowed. The ma’am drop indicated that gendered respect was this man’s weak spot. “Thank you very much!”

“S’no problem,” he said, flushing a little.

“If you don’t mind, I could get you juice for your trouble? What’s your name, sir?”

He chanced a smile. “Toshihide Nishi. You don’t have to go through the trouble.”

Which was code for: please, for the love of the colonel, be quick, I am about to dry out. Even security guards in Japan were prone to being a little too polite.  
“I’ll be quick then,” Marie said. “Thank you!”

Mr. Toshihide tipped his hat. She started off, hearing him hit his seat moments after losing him from view.

Security stations didn’t detect a breach, which was good. She had an alibi, a name conjured from air, and, importantly, she had someone to look for. Not exactly a map of the place, but a social landmark to chat with if it came to that.

Marie hoped it wouldn’t come to that. That was asking for an extended conversation, more social finesse, less of a chance to get out quickly. Her conversation with security was as much alibi building as it was probing his emotional and mental state, it had a function. Keeping her cover only increased the risk she would screw up and get caught. Staying here to witness an operation in one of the theaters was trauma gift-wrapped with a bow, and she did not want to see more than she had to see.

She kept her pace light. Alert, but light. 

The ‘wards’ of this garage laid ahead. Large, rectangular prisms, with the parking strips painted over, and cinder block walls sectioning them off. Each ward had a viewing room, and external windows to monitor activity from the outside. Keycard slots on redundant door locks, and doors with mostly metal frames. Probably bulletproof. Multiple layers of glass lined in the frame suggested they could withstand a great deal of force too.

Considering who Zhongma wanted to capture, Marie couldn’t fault the contractors for being thorough. If you planned to commit invasive surgery on sapient beings, you might as well be prepared for when they rightfully get upset.

The wards were stocked, and largely empty. She counted thirty gurneys per section, with wash basins and supply dumps for syringes, blankets and pillows already sorted. It was all medical surplus, none of it particularly state of the art. The straps on the gurneys were new, though. Medically sterile leather strips with buckles, a pair for arms, a pair for legs. They were bolted into the metal.

It was like previewing an apocalypse bunker. A place for the medically infirm to wait while their brains rotted out and gave them over to psychosis. She could imagine the justifications going through their minds.

“Doctor?” a man with an American tone clucked at her.

“Doctor,” Marie answered confidently.

“Doctor…?” came the voice of a petite Indochinese woman.

“Doctor.”

“Aha, doctor~” a Congolese nurse cajoled.

“Doctor, mhm.”

None of them objected to the principle of the job. Tying down beastmen and ‘curing’ them of their identity, either literally, or with a syringe marked for euthanasia. It sent a chill through her chest to see so many people here in a neutral state of mind. Tired, living off the same rank heat, but still given to the task and looking forward to it with a banal neutrality. As if the code of ethical medical care precluded holding someone down for their own good.

They saw the straps on the gurneys as safety precautions.

Marie saw the same straps as an expectation of resistance.

Were the staff in Zhongma aware of what they were doing? Did they know that beastmen were not only intelligent, but often proud of their heritage? It didn’t really click with Marie that the two were one in the same. She rarely met a monster, and when she did, the tells were fairly obvious.

These people seemed to think of the clinic and the DEVO agent as background elements to their daily lives. A step to fixing something wrong, some of them might say. Most wouldn’t even think of it that far. Complicit though they were, they were simply working for an amorphous good, malleable to the deceit they managed for themselves.

But then, wouldn’t Marie do that too? Did not she not lie to herself? 

If beastmen were the dominant form of life on Earth and humans were in the minority, would beastmen try to ‘fix’ them in the same way humans were doing now?

There was a parable in there, but Marie didn’t want to think about it. Whatever the staff were up to in Zhongma, her job wasn’t to judge or empathize. Just manipulate.  
After a walkabout, Marie made the determination that the third floor had the goods. Most of the second floor was medical wards, a staff barracks and an auxiliary power room with a tired generator. Nothing useful yet. With any luck, it would never see use after today, and it’d be properly torn down.

She gave a quick heads-up to a handsome Argentine woman with a research team lanyard and found her way further down via a flight of stairs with painted rails and warnings painted on the walls.

-AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY || TURN BACK-

The lights dimmed lower as she reached the furthest place from the surface. In a creeping realization, she thought she was stepping into the halls of tartarus. But it was nothing that grand, no, just a Chthonic place of suffering. 

Where the walls upstairs were cinder block and utilitarian, surfaces were uniformly glossy. Like a hardened sort of plastic. They were narrow, funneling her to a walkable space barely five feet wide. Panels were built into them. Circuitry lines ran in either direction, protected by coverings. They were clean to the point of intimidation. Inorganic and inauthentic to the lived experience.

The third floor started on a landing. The landing took her to a control station via a narrow hallway. It was shaped like a node, a half-circle of modems, desktops and servers, whose lights were lonely in the gloom. Marie stepped tentatively, finding rooms ahead of her, around her. It pushed her to hide. They were like spokes on a wheel. Each one probably 100x80 feet in area, voluminous and deep. They were marked ‘1’ to ‘8,’ with honorific titles like ‘in-unit,’ ‘field,’ ‘production’ and ‘application.’ Immediately clear functions.

The layout unnerved her. From precisely the center of the control station, at the head of a console, the research head could watch experiments going on from any angle. Constant surveillance.

There was no one at stations, thankfully. There was commotion in the room numbered 6, though. Marie poked out to count the number of heads, and thanked whatever divine being was up there that security didn’t see her. There were four goons and seven major staff, and they were all in some kind of low intensity meeting in room 8, the break room.  
Someone commanded their attention. A demure figure in a Taisho-patterned shawl, with greying hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Aged features, but not old. Scar tissue along the temple. Adept on a cane, but her gait suggested she didn’t need one. She was in the middle of a pleasant discussion Marie couldn’t hear, but nevertheless one that she commanded without having to speak up. It was supposedly friendly, and the woman may have passed for a grandmother if it didn’t feel like she would suck the blood out of a small child if it made her young again.

Director Ishii Rei, her name tag read.

She smiled at her captive audience. Marie’s blood ran cold.

There were hundreds of places Ishii could have come from. Tokyo U’s biogenetics wing, the department of national health, somewhere buried in the JSDF’s files, but Marie was inclined to trust first impressions. Not a nice lady.

Marie hid back behind the shadow of a monitor. Her eyes darted around the panopticon lab, taking in details rapidly. A plan was coming together. 

She palmed the flash drive in her back pocket. Step one was planting a bug in the server. Her contact promised that once it clicked into the USB port, ‘auto launching software would force a virus through internal security and dig for all files relevant to the DEVO program.’ Using the mole’s exact words, since computer security wasn’t exactly her specialty. The mechanics didn’t matter - what did matter was that the virus was designed to trawl the network of computers tied to the server quietly. Which it did with a very light hum. 

She estimated she had seven or so minutes before the fail safes broke and someone in the security office noticed a breach. Not even the mole could make something this good.

Step two was somewhere in the production floor rooms. Rose wanted a physical sample of the DEVO agent. A couple milligrams in a vial would do for experimental analysis. She didn’t say it out loud, but the mayor wanted more to present to the United Nations as proof of attempted crimes against beastmen, so that was precisely what Marie was going to try to do.

Safely, though. The agent was still a biohazard to anyone with BNA, and Rose warned her up and down not to handle it without some sort of guaranteed protection. For the mayor’s sake, and for her own continued survival, Marie brought gloves. The spool of gauze in her pocket would also be very useful.

She ducked out of the station while her bug went to work and scanned the rooms one at the time. The intel report on the layout was proven right one discovery at a time. One centrifuge, powered down. One lab station for synthesizing DNA. A compact electronic microscope - which must’ve cost Zhongma a fortune to miniaturize. She wanted to dig into the circuitry and ruin it out of spite, but there wasn’t enough time in the world for that.

Nimbly, Marie swiped a stoppered vial of clear solution. And another. And another after that for good measure. As many samples of the DEVO agent as she could, in as many stages as labeled. 

Apparently, the chemical had an application process. A primer, followed by an early stage steroid, and then multiple ‘symptomatic’ steroids to continue the process. Marie was a little surprised it wasn’t as simple of a drug as DDT, though that might have come down to how complicated the formula was. She didn’t have information to figure that part out, and decided not to think about it. 

While passing ‘application,’ however, Marie saw something she didn’t expect.

Just on the other side of an empty gurney, almost obscured by a rolling medical cabinet and spotlight fixture, was a line of cages. Mostly small, but some big enough to house a large dog. A dropper bottle in most, a handful graciously given bowls hanging off the iron mesh. Bedding was mostly stock, the kind of industrial down given to lab animals out of obligation.

They were empty now. The bars were bent, and the locks near-busted, but the cages were empty. It made a certain sort of sense - but why was Zhongma doing animal testing when…

There was a rustle in the cages. Marie stepped up to investigate.

“... hey!” came a squeak.

Marie froze.

“Yeah you! You comin’ back, huh?! Freaking human, you gonna finish the job?!”

It was a very tinny voice. With tinny slang Japanese and a tinny feminine tone. 

“I’m not about to go without a fight! I-I’ll kick the shit out of you-”

Because it belonged to a militant, orange-colored rabbit.

Marie scampered across the room with her fingers hurriedly trying to make the shushing motion. “Not now, please stop-”

The rabbit squeaked back at her. There was a pause to the conversation outside, but after a beat, the meeting seemed to ignore it.

“Where’s Ishii, that snake?” the rabbit demanded. She kicked at the cage. “Take me to her!”

“Stop it now or we’re both gone,” Marie hissed, in as low of a voice as she could manage. “Okay?”

The rabbit hesitated. She looked Marie up and down with eyes too expressive for an animal. “What the hell is your deal?”

Marie looked down at her from a crouch and unsheathed her claws.

That was all it took. “... you’re a beastman,” the rabbit muttered.

Marie sighed. This little absurdity was something she had to take in stride. She checked for camera stations before she thought to continue. “And what are you? You speak our language pretty well.”

“That’s because I’m one of you guys!” the rabbit sputtered out. “I’m a beastman. I-I have BNA, I can prove it.”

“Gimme a name.”

The rabbit batted around her cage, evidently trying to sort out a compulsion, or some kind of deep-rooted instinct. “Chae-Rin Gwan,” she finally said. “I live… lived here.”

Marie stared at Chae-Rin. Koreans were one of the two minorities in the neighborhood. That tracked uncomfortably well. She swallowed. “... DEVO?”

If a rabbit could frown, Marie detected it. Chase-Rin’s ears fell lop. “You know about that gunk?”

“Answer my question first, honey - what happened? You get swept up in this?”

Chae-Rin sat up on her haunches, a reflexive act of a mindset she was still actively fighting. The details were working in her head. Looking at her, Marie noticed a few things. She was bigger than the Korean hare her phenotype came from - though by now, not very much bigger. Probably half a meter tall, if she put her ears up. A little chubbier, almost overweight. Her eyes were expressive, yes, but mostly turned to iris, and set upon a skull that just barely had human features. There was a tuft, a marker of black hair between her ears, that was possibly all that was left. 

There was that rage too. Too much for a little rabbit frame. It leaked out in thumps, little shivers of activity. Eventually, though, Chae-Rin found intentionality and spoke as calmly as she could:

“I used to fight people. Part of a gang, on Hana-dori. Nobody knew who I was, my mom taught me good. Didn’t trust nobody, cuz I’m doubly fucked, y’know? I’m a nobody myself, so I really had to pretend I was somebody else most of the time. She wanted to go to Anima City the longest time, but it’s-”

“Hard?”

“Yeah…. Two weeks ago, I get really, really pissed at this one guy. Goes to my high school. His dad does something - construction, I guess - he’s loaded. Bastard wealthy, and he’s got the attitude to fuck girls up, put their pictures online. I found him walking home and beat him and his droogs up until they were bloody, but they cut me real bad.”

She tilted to the side, putting her scarred flank to the light.

“I limped to the clinic. They put me on some kind of chill meds, and I blacked out. I guess that was, what, a week ago. Every time I woke up, I-I was a little smaller, a little more like… trapped in my head.”

Marie’s jaw worked without sound. She found words eventually. “Devolving.”

“That’s one word,” Chae-Rin said mournfully. “Fuck.”

She glanced down at her paws. “They’re almost done with me. I can’t get any of them to talk, so it’s like - I have to stay awake as long as I can to get scraps outta them.”

“Is this thing still not ready?” Marie interjected.

Chae-Rin stammered. “Yeah. Y-yeah, it’s still like, takes ages to work.”

“And how many people’ve been through this already?”

She made an obstinate little rabbit frown. “I’m trying to be dramatic here!”

“Good effort,” Marie said flatly. “Right now’s kind of a bad time.”

Chae-Rin huffed. “Nine. It’s not permanent… yet. But they got moved out of this place somewhere when they stopped being able to speak.”

“You mean the DEVO agent isn’t a permanent solution yet? I’m hearing you right, Chae-Rin?”

Chae-Rin gazed up at her in surprise. “... you used my name?”

“Because you’re still a beastman. Duh. It’s your name.”

Chae-Rin shook her head. “But I’m…”

“Not fully devolved yet,” Marie finished. She looked back one more time to make sure this conversation wasn’t being eavesdropped. “... so that means we’re on a first name basis, Chae-Rin. Got it?”

Tentatively, Chae-Rin nodded. She tamped the obvious question down. “What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m about to make a clean getaway with a sample of DEVO and destroy their little research program. How about you? You wanna get out of that cage?”

Chae-Rin recoiled at that. Marie blinked, but she understood a catch when she saw one.

“... it’s still on me,” Chae-Rin said.

“I have gloves,” Marie said, pointing to them as if they were the most obvious thing.

“It seeps through clothes,” Chae-Rin insisted. She hopped to the bars of the cage, hesitant and desperate to make Marie see. “They complain about their junk getting soaked all the time. Nothing but a freaking bubble boy suit’s gonna stop it from getting into your skin, and… and you’ll change too…!”

For a little while, Marie hazarded, but even thinking that was hedging on the moral boundaries she didn’t want to cross. Chae-Rin’s struggle was too much not to think about. She was just some punk kid. She was living in the wrong place at the wrong time and stuck for the wrong cause, and now she was a step away from being converted into a mute animal. Once that happened, Zhongma could ship her anywhere, treat her as a non-person because she certainly couldn’t represent herself.

It was a gross violation of bodily autonomy and personhood. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled with the onset of disgust.  
But even so - what the fuck was she thinking? Exfiltrate a former beastman? That was off-script. Just because Chae-Rin had a sob story, got snatched up by bad people, she had the immediate need to be rescued? 

Marie could come back. She sat on that thought as her nerves stiffened up. Take the sample, fry the server and run. Drop all her stuff at the safehouse in Shibuya and come back the next day. 

By then, Zhongma would have a positive ID. They would know who snuck in and took their stuff. They weren’t stupid. They could check the feeds minutes after they saw the damage, and mark Marie for death if she so much as sneezed on the property. Going back was suicide.

But so was making off with a rabbit with a mutagenic curse in her fur. Chae-Rin caught her grimacing at the glossy look in her coat. It was still moist, damp with chemicals. Nitrile gloves wouldn’t stop its effects any more than a few layers of clothes. The things Marie would do for a duffle bag right about now…

It looked like the only feasible way to be a good person was to take the risk.

And the only feasible way to get out of this mission without ending up in a cage herself was to leave Chae-Rin to her fate.

Marie bit her lip. She unhooked the cage door.

“What the hell?! H-hey-”

Marie shushed her. “This is your fault if we’re both caught.”

Chae-Rin wriggled. Marie’s hands came up on her and hoisted her out. “But you’re the one sticking your neck out! Dumbass! What kinda dumbass are you?!”

Marie looked over her shoulder. She felt the DEVO agent soak through the nitrile latex as she touched it. Wetness by proxy, slowly seeping down until it eventually reached her skin. Whatever they made this stuff from, it was distressingly good at getting through materials. One mistake beget another, she supposed. If it was going to pierce into the rubber, what difference did it make sticking the rabbit under her armpit?

“H-hey!”

Down Chae-Rin went. Marie shot up straight, saddling her new friend/compatriot/victim/deadweight in the crook of her coat.

“You got a bad habit of being too freaking loud,” Marie hissed. “Shut it till we’re clear.”

“I am rightfully upset at my imprisonment!” Chae-Rin hissed back, while also lowering her voice to a muffled whisper. “Dammit!”

Liquid dread dripped down Marie’s insides. That could possibly have been the chemical, but a fine misting of DEVO didn’t feel like oozing emotion sludge. The enormity of what she’d done was dawning on her. She’d have the hurry. Risk more mistakes.

If she was quick enough, though, it wouldn’t matter. Long as she managed to get out on all fours, then Marie could live with herself. She cursed her sanctimonious bullshit.  
Quietly. She cursed it quietly.

Things weren’t much different than when the conversation started. The meeting moved on to safety procedures in the midst of a breach. Chae-Rin’s outburst earlier was met with pretty universal indifference. Ishii was sitting, and one of the junior professor types was pointing to canned slides on a powerpoint.

Marie’s eyes met a guard’s. He raised an eyebrow at her. Her heart dropped.

“Oh, hey, am I late?” Marie replied coolly.

The man nodded. This one seemed smarter than the goon upstairs, if only because his crew cut was smarter, and he had a naturally skeptical look in his eyes. 

She steeled her nerves. “Is it alright if I sort out my onboarding? Ah. I need to run a few things by the copier. I’ll be five, okay?”

His expression sat right on the border between stare and glare. Like Marie was interrupting a meeting, which she was. She put her hand up to do the whole amicability thing and wave, but right as it settled in to do the motion, nice and slow, the muscles spasmed. Goosebumps crept up the wrist.

She shoved it down. Smiled. “I’ll be back.” 

And ran for the shadow under the stairs.

“What’s the matter?” Chae-Rin squeaked at low volume. “Are we leaving?”

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck-” Marie mantraed under her breath. A feeling was taking over her hand, one she didn’t know where the start fighting. It sprawled on the fault line between ticklish numbness and and tension stuck on a slow release. Satisfaction in a shadow. It was sliding along her arm, digging into the unspoken ‘it’ that allowed beastmen to transform back and forth.

It nagged at her to clench her fingers one more time, just one more - and when she did, her claws popped out. Marie swore.

“That didn’t sound good,” Chae-Rin muffled.

“I know it didn’t,” Marie whispered. “Claws are out…”

She couldn’t reel them back in. Normally, it was like pulling her spirit back and just willing fingernails to come back, but the little clear claws wouldn’t listen. They just wobbled in place!

A soft line traveled over her palms. Her pores lit up as it swept, a clean activation of raw, tender nerves. She stared, wrapped up in awe of seeing, as the underknuckle puffed, and tiny pink bulbs began to grow.

“Ladyyyyy!”

“What?” Marie said. She took her bunny captive out. “And don’t call me lady.”

Chae-Rin wriggled in her hands. There was a lot more texture in them than Marie remembered. “What do I call you then?”

Marie paused. She was trying to get back to the feverish mindset that could figure a way out, but she couldn’t find a way to focus on anything other than her budding, ripening toebeans. “Marie. That’s good enough.”

Chae-Rin grinned, glad to actually be on a first-name basis now. “Why are we sticking around, we’ve got to motor.”

Marie searched for a reason. “... the drive!”

“The what?”

“I left a flash drive in the server. The mayor of Anima City wants the data on how to make DEVO.”

“What?!”

“She’s presenting it to the UN as Hague evidence - what, you expect me to figure out everything for you?”

“I think we don’t got a lot of time, weasel-”

Marie bared her teeth at her armpit. “MINK! That’s enough outta you.”

Pheromone smells were pretty common among beastmen. Chae-Rin could probably smell her species this close to her body, and with all the sweat perspiring off of her…

Marie shook the inattention out of her head. She had to focus. Their lives were at stake if she didn’t turn her brain on and pick a direction.

She looked up the stairs, and back into the control center. The guard had gotten impatient and was looking back into the meeting.

“... how much time does it take to… ‘transform’ the first time?”

Chae-Rin snorted, turning her snout up. “Now you want to ask me stuff?”

Marie gave her best deadpan reply. “I need to know so we don’t disappear.”

“Took days for me, but I heard something about controlled spays. It might take…”

“Fifteen minutes?”

Chae-Rin kicked agreeably. “Sounds about right.”

“Fifteen minutes, then,” Marie agreed. “I’m going to hook you under my arm as tight as you can. We have to run all the way out.”

“Out the front door?”

Marie nodded in the negative. “Through the vents two floors up. We’re going to go now, you understand?”

Chae-Rin made a noise that was almost a quip. She made an affirmative grunt instead.

“Hang on tight,” Marie said.

She scrabbled out of the stairwell’s shadow. Her heart was beating up in her throat, turning into a racket in her head. It wasn’t a good sign to heart her pulse racing. Just meant the agent was traveling through her blood faster.

For all she knew, and all she didn’t want to know, it was incentive to be quick.

Marie slid into the control center, just barely avoiding a collision with the server farm. Her hand scrambled up the plastic, making clicking sounds, until they found the flash drive. She squeezed her hand over it, but the finger bones slipped and popped. A satisfying feeling, sure - but her thumbs were pulling away. There wasn’t enough grip left in her digits to get a hold of the damn thing that dared to call itself a thumb drive!

“Shit,” she exhaled. One hand couldn’t do it - so she balanced both hands over the drive and yanked it out. The monitor above made an error sound.

“You got it?” Chae-Rin asked, quiet as a lab rabbit.

“Not for long,” Marie said. “Take it, I can’t fit it in my pockets.”

An exaggeration, but not a big one. Chae-Rin put her paws out. Marie deposited the drive with greater care than she’d ever shown a piece of hardware. Her thumbs lost a joint with a pleasant sounding pop before Chae-Rin got it secure in her mouth.

Marie started back up again - and stopped a step into it. Her back suddenly didn’t like standing up in a crouch. She winced, waited for the guard’s vision to track back to the meeting again, and ran like sneaky dickens to the stairwell.

The change was coming. It was gnawing at her; well no, gnawing wasn’t the word. Gnawing implied chewing at the essence inside her, like a beaver chiseling out stakes with its teeth. This was a shadow dance. An invisible sweep of not-rightness that was infiltrating into the body and changing how things worked without notifying anyone. Combined with the heat, it was starting to become a guessing game for what she could count on, and what was not usable anymore.

She felt something writhe down the seat of her pants. It was her tail, the tail she didn’t call for, wriggling out of her tailbone. It pressed into her jeans, dented upwards until it spilled over the beltline, slowing her run to a jog. 

Halfway up the steps, Marie heard a rustle, and a sharp weakness in her back muscle. She turned her shoulder to sate it, and felt her spine stretch a vertebrae bone too far. An involuntary twitch folded her arms in, making Chae-Rin yelp in surprise.

“It’s nothing,” Marie blurted out, but it was more than that. 

A mink’s body plan was mostly centralized; a slinky body, head and tail, limbs to either side. Same for most creatures in the same family. They had stubby arms, and walked on all fours, and had other things that weren’t conducive to being a biped. Marie felt herself sliding back down the evolutionary ladder, pulled with ropes down to a body she didn’t know how to accommodate.

By the time she’d gotten up the stairs, her pants were sagging. Her hips were vanishing, turning the wrong way. Sleeves coiled over her useless paws. Her scalp was tingling with repatriating hair, and her arms struggled under unkind shoulder joints. 

And everywhere - everywhere - Marie’s skin itched with the splotchy growth of mustelid fur.

Slick with sweat and doused in fear, she ran through the second floor. Her face felt human - it probably looked like it in a blur. She ran past orderlies and nurses, and heard them calling after her as she rounded corners. 

A turn too fast, and she nearly bowled over. Her balance swung out of place, like a pendulum pushed so far it threatened to snap off its hinges. Her midriff had pillowed out of the growing divide between her shirt and her jeans, covered in a band of slick fur. And - there was that sensation again. She found her tail had grown again, and was hanging barely an inch off the ground!

She shut her lab coat. When was the last time she was ever embarrassed to have a mink coat? Growing up with Mom?

She kicked herself for being so nostalgic in the middle of a mad dash for life.

The guard station wasn’t far Marie pushed herself, wincing at the awkward clicking of bones that increasingly didn’t want to stand upright. They couldn’t make up their mind - tilting forward, then yanking backward, then shimmying in a jerk left to right, right to left. Teetering back and forth. The play in her spine was so awfully mercurial, she looked more like three kids in a trenchcoat than a human being, wobbling back and forth to keep a consistent center of gravity.  
Toshihide saw her and shot up. “Kitano? Is everything-”

“Gotta go!” Marie blurted, remembering in a rush that she used Kitano as her cover name. “I-I left something in my car, ah-”

“The garage is that way!” he helpfully reminded her. There was something about her blur that looked off...

“Iparkedatstreetlevelcan’ttalkbyyyye-”

“Miss Kitano!”

Marie made it up all of three stairs before her back threw her forward again. She grasped for the railing and gasped out a breath. The pops were coming more frequently, which meant her posture was going to the dogs. Her thighs ached. Her throat burned for fresh air, but all of Marie’s instincts told her not to step.  
The fiction holding Chae-Rin slipped suddenly. The bunny squeaked in protest and wriggled to get out. “Lemme drop! I can’t fit!”

Marie let her go. Chae-Rin bolted to the nearest step, and looked the stairway passage up and down. “One more floor, right?”

“Oooohhhh…!”

“Marie?!”

Sand was pouring into the little dips and depressions that made up Marie’s human face. This was a familiar feeling. Every time she switched into her real body, her beastman shape, her face went through a sudden and rapid restructuring that turned thin lips and a short european nose into a stubby half-snout. It was just seconds long, but the process was like falling into fascination, letting the sand cave through the human imperfection and mould it back out to a shape that felt true.

It was happening again, but slower. Achingly, indelibly slower. There was no pretension to stop at just half a snout. She could sense the grains eroding off her skull, carried along a river of tumbling soul sediment. The pits of her eyes subtly changing shape, like dunes swept by wind, gulleys chiseled between sharpening teeth and stretching jaw. Just as her hairline was finally sinking down into the scalp, her cheeks narrowed as the tip of her nose pinked, and whiskers sprouted in a diamond arc. Her eyes crossed down, surrounded by a march of silver fur. Marie’s mind had gone blank. It had surrendered to the fixation of feeling!

Chae-Rin bonked into her headfirst, again and again. “We gotta go, hero lady! They’re coming! U-uh! You…. you weasel!”

Marie snapped back to attention. “I’m… a MINK!”

“Thank god - we’re almost there-”

“I KNOW!”

Chae-Rin pointed up the stairwell. “Then let’s go already!”

The worst part of it all was that it wasn’t unpleasant. Marie found herself stopping so many times because the process of going backward, transforming, felt satisfying. Sprawled on the railing, she didn’t want to move. She wanted to suss out what was happening, feed the lizard brain curiosity that convinced humans to touch themselves in awe. It was nearly the same feeling as dropping disguise and code-switching back to a hybrid form, just a notch more… baseline! The bastards, she thought, they figured out how to make this enjoyable!

But not enjoyable enough to subdue her. Marie corralled Chae-Rin on her back and decided not to fight instinct any longer. She fell onto her forepaws and climbed.

The situation was rapidly going to pieces. Someone had set off the alarm - server breach. Marie’s ears were getting too sensitive to the blaring noise, fanning out and rewiring the frequencies her eardrums picked up, but she picked out ‘intruder’ and ‘compromised’ out of the slurry of words coming out of the speakers. That was enough to know her dirty work had been spotted and reported up the chain. Bottom floor was on high alert, and the next two were about to be locked down.

Somewhere along the way, Marie’s clothes began to come apart. She caught snippets of the process between leaps - jean material crumpling at the ankle, stolen heels popping off her shrinking feet and tumbling down the steps, thighs pinched with jean material until the inelasticity of her bones ripped open fissures in the denim. Up north, around her chest, her breasts were goners - barely there when this started, and now incorporated into a barreling rib cage and pectoral muscles, holding a bunched up bra hostage and cinching into a sweater that couldn’t take much more than this. The collar of the coat clung to the back of her neck. Sleeves dangled. The stitching across its shoulders threatened to rip at any moment.

Her disguise was turning into a sheath of uncomfortable fabric. An inconvenient mess that wasn’t built for her, could never be useful to these tactile paws.  
The pleasant ripple of air conditioning told her she was close. Close to the air ducts. She tore into a turn, regretting the cold patch developing on her belly and the sluggish sandbag dysphoria sinking into her midsection. It didn’t make sense - even put on all fours, Marie must have been somewhere in the svelte category.

Then she remembered that Chae-Rin was a chubby rabbit and put two and two together. Enjoyable and fattening. DEVO was deliberately slowing her down. It’s like Zhongma thought the best way to subdue a beastman was to stuff them into fat and happy feral creatures.

Point to them, she thought, that’s clever. Diabolical, but clever. She’d hate to see the day when this gunk was made for a mace bottle.

Instincts rode her into a gallop for the medical supply room. She passed under a camera, kicked into the door, sped through it as the door clacked against the wall, and climbed box piles to the duct she came in through.

Marie didn’t know why she was moving so fast. Was she terrified? Was the fear of getting caught activating something in the back of her waking mind? Or were the chemicals inundating her with new instincts, heighting her nerves to the sharpness of a knife?

She honestly didn’t care which theory made the most sense. She just barely made it into the duct with her swelling flab dragging her down, and whether the scramble was feral or not, it was carrying her up into that claustrophobic maze.

Chae-Rin ducked down, wrapping her paws around Marie’s neck folds. “I can barely fit!”

Marie gulped air. “Yeah, me neither! Hold oooon!”

The metal clanged with her steps. It fell into steady staccato as she passed joint after joint, making for the straightaway that led to the climb back upstairs. She felt the lips of connecting pieces kiss at her stomach and smack into her tail. They were carefully reminding her that the process wasn’t finished. It wasn’t done.

Marie was still gaining weight.

She tumbled into the shaft, paws grabbing for anything that could be leverage, pushing herself straight up. Her claws caught and scraped on the walls, tail banged and sent reverberations as far up as the ceiling. Marie’s poor ears rang. Chae-Rin moaned in distress. The world was made of ugly noise, and they were stuck struggling against gravity, clumsiness and time.

Still, Marie climbed.

The mind killer wasn’t growing too fat to move, kami-sama forbid. No, it was suction. Marie’s furry folds were catching against the joints connecting duct sections. Precariously pinching, rubbing her tighter and tighter. She was passing floors at a reasonable pace, but Marie wasn’t ferret-sized. She still had the rough mass of a critter used to skipping their gym days. If her body ballooned too much, too thick in the center…

It wouldn’t matter if they outrunned security. The vents had her number.

She struggled to pull herself over the lip to the second floor vents. All the adrenaline strength in her forelimbs was draining away. Her legs and tail dangled off a virtual, wriggling against the wall, conspiring with her guts to drag her down with that dull, sandbag weight.

“Hnnngh… hnnnnnghhh!!!”

Chae-Rin ran ahead, squeaking something that wasn’t words. Pointing, gesturing. The exit was right there. Just past a corner. The soundscape of Ōkubo, the chilly winter air. Oh, it felt good. Her fur was slick with sweat, but it prickled to attention. A break from the heat, a break from being hunted.

Marie stopped to breathe. Pant. The walls were too tight. Paws too weak. Belly too full. But she couldn’t stop. The vents were filling with the noises of alert and angry humans, buzzing around their perfidious hive, and they’d get her and Chae-Rin if she didn’t move. 

Marie pushed with her paws again. Again! It was torture on her slinky adominals, but eventually, with all her effort and all her waning strength, she pulled herself over the edge with claws hooked into grating.

“Are you okay?!” Chae-Rin screamed. Her voice had gone raw.

“Keep going! I’m just-” Marie stopped herself before she could damn to hell. Stuck, tired, slow - every one of those words would put the stake in their hopes and nail them to the spot.

She had a piddly little bit of adrenaline left. It wasn’t in the struggle - or at least, it was hardly there, cushioned in her body, but out in the wild. In Chae-Rin’s body. That… prey animal body. Instinct. Hunter instincts. A prey animal standing in view. Unwilling to run. Her body wanted her to chase it down, but… but no, she couldn’t turn on Chae-Rin. Animal instincts or naught, it was wrong.

It took a channel of willpower to keep that adrenaline locked in place, keep it from infecting her mind with thoughts of chasing down rodents and scooping them up by the neck. Ideations of dead prey animals stuck to her waking mind like a stain. Images. 

Dead orange rabbit in her jaw.

If this adrenaline rush put her unconscious, she had to commit now, more than ever, to the rescue. Chae-Rin was her stupid charge, the foolish mistake she took with her. Her emergency ration. The rabbit was her responsibility, and Marie was committed to her rescue because she cared. She cared so much she was sick with caring.

“Next right,” Marie managed. “Take a right! I’ll be right behind you!”

Chae-Rin stopped in disbelief, but Marie shot her a glare and sent her packing.

Just one more push. Then she could pass out.

Drag her chubby frame over the finish line and pass out on the roof.

Her lungs burned. Breaths came faint, shallow, short. Her skin radiated with exertion and heat, and muscles with complaint.

This body was dragging her back into captivity. But Marie wasn’t a goddamn captive animal, she was a sapient being. A mink. A proud mink!

She shoved herself forward, pressing and kicking off with her legs. The walls constricted on her, tightened the pressure like screws needling into her doughy skin.

Just a little farther…

Just.

One.

More.

PUSH.

Marie regained consciousness in a fog. She felt fabric on her fur, rolled over like a cocoon. Her body plan outlined in sensory memory - quadruped all the way down. There was a light overhead, a smell like rubbing alcohol and nitrile. Colors dripped and melted into blurs of indistinct shapes. There was sleep in her eyes, and an overall unwillingness to get up.

She blinked the grains in her eyes away and realized she was under a quilt, on an honest mattress, in a small room painted with posters, under the careful watch of a space heater propped up on moving boxes.

This was nothing close to a torture ward.

Slowly, she got up to standing on her forepaws. Her mind was somehow groggy and clear-headed at the same time - like she was coming off a steroid shot of antihistamines with a careful dose of caffeine. Was she well-rested? It almost felt that way.

She rolled over herself. Marie didn’t enjoy sitting upright, or at least, her back didn’t. Her belly pressed into the bedsheets momentarily, and all at once, Marie was unnerved, but still delighted. 

Did she really have to get up? 

Her ears twitched. A low hum of a song was playing a floor down on an old radio, something that sounded like a city pop reverie, carried by an angel true to her heart.

There was bottled water on the nightstand. A tray of biscuits and dumplings that looked to have gone cold.

Is this Chae-Rin’s house? She thought sleepily. That’s not smart… lead them right to everyone else…

Her thoughts were interrupted by a long yawn. Someone stirred out in the hall, about two doors down maybe, and they came slowly to the door frame.

It was the rabbit, Chae-Rin Gwan. And not a few moments after, her apron-clad mother, coming up the stairs.

She’d progressed some ways back to beastman shape, but Chae-Rin was still halfway to bipedalism. A little ungainly, more leg and rabbit’s foot than was easy to walk around with, but most of her torso was coming back. She was wearing a Queen shirt for modesty. At three feet tall, generously measured, it was a gown draped over her shoulders more than it was a groupie shirt. It should have hung off her body, but the curves underneath implied that it wasn’t as free-flowing as it should have been. She must still be carrying some of that weight. 

Did it ever wear off? Or was she going to grow back into shape while being out of shape? If she wasn’t lucky, then her fighting days were numbered. 

Her hair at least was normalizing. It had come back into a pixie-cut fullness, and the eyes it framed were smaller, better balanced against her coat. Chubby cheeks puffed out the sides of her face. They were a little too fat to give her that hard-bitten look, but it made her cute, and that was fine too.

All things considered, Chae-Rin looked an awful lot like her mom. Small, fierce little women. Marie resisted the urge to think of Chae-Rin as a stringy piece of meat, and instead, as a girl.

“Heeey…” Marie offered, still too drowsy to get up. “I’m awake.”

“Mmmh!” Chae-Rin nodded.

Her mother smiled softly. “Good morning. How are you feeling?”

“Like a weasel,” Marie moaned. She stuck her tongue out for emphasis. “How long was I out?”

The older rabbit came around to the edge of the bed and checked a small thermometer. “Oh, very long. Two days. My daughter dragged you to the back stoop, you were very tired.”

Chae-Rin, who was clinging to the wall for support, blushed hard enough to show through fur. “I did my best,” she said. 

“You’re bad at modesty,” Marie quipped. She didn’t necessarily believe Chae-Rin did the work, but far be it from her to question how she ended up in bed.

“H-hey!”

“Shhhshhshsh,” Miss Gwan said, putting little paw fingers to Marie’s snout. “Don’t pick fights you’re not prepared to win.”

Marie reckoned she didn’t want to pick a fight with either of the fighting hares. Even if Miss Gwan had a gracious, gentle air to how she moved, there was a hardness in her eyes she shared with Chae-Rin. The bun in her hair made her exceptionally powerful.

Miss Gwan picked up the tray of cold food. “Dinner is two hours. Would you like to have this now, or wait for something hot?”

All of the hard bitten street ego melted under the suggestion. Marie looked away, flushing warm in her cheeks. “I’ll… nibble on the cookies, thank you. Though, um, please tell me if this is a stupid question.”

“Yes?”  
“Why are you helping me?” asked Marie. “I’m wanted. I’m a suspect in a break-in. You know about the break-in down the street, right? The clinic? I’m… involved in that.”

Miss Gwan traded a glance with her daughter. She had nothing to say, just a little fidget, so Miss Gwan answered her instead. “Because you saved my family.”

“That’s a risk, la- um. Ma’am.”

Miss Gwan closed her eyes and smiled. “I’m aware, yes. I am used to it. It’s why I tell Chae-Rin not to go off to strange hospitals from now on.”

There was a pause. The tone Miss Gwan used somehow didn’t make it to patronizing or chastising. There was too much masked concern. It sounded, instead, like a lesson nobody should have had to learn on their own, and would’ve been fatal if someone didn’t step in.

“For now, though? You’re a guest in my home until you feel better.”

Marie suddenly remembered something. “M-my clothes, what happened to my… clothes…?”

She saw them past Miss Gwan’s side, piled up in a hamper. Torn up, but still functionally one labcoat, one set of jeans, two socks and a surprisingly intact turtleneck sweater. A flashdrive and vial were set neatly on the top.

“... am I allowed to curse in this house, or ah-”

“No,” Miss Gwan said, sweet but firm.

“Okay,” Marie whispered.

“Now,” said Miss Gwan as she started towards the door. Her eyes drifted lazily to Chae-Rin. “I can’t remember the last time you helped me make dinner. You must’ve been seven or eight.”

“Mooom, please?! Not in front of her-”

“I’m teasing you, I’m teasing you…”

They hopped together back down to the landing of their tiny two-story house. Leaving Marie alone with her comfort, the waves of what happened lapping at the edge of her mind.

That was almost a fiasco. And yet here she was, recovering in a warm bed, waiting for the mutagen to wear itself out and let her tentatively come back to her shapeshifting medium.

Was there something to be learned here? A lesson to her selfish nature?

The fact she was framing it that way indicated no, Marie didn’t have much to learn, or much of a drive to learn it.

She got lucky. And so did Chae-Rin. But Chae-Rin was a good kid if she managed to get her here in one piece, mission objectives in tow. Smart, tough, a little fighter in the making.

It was a shame she got caught up in the machinery of espionage. Marie betted Chae-Rin was just glad to get back home.

That was one thing Chae-Rin still had. A home to get back to. A mom that was still there to clean her up and let her recover, shield her from the evil of the world. One of those nostalgic things Marie never allowed herself to fall back into, since it was too bittersweet to be a pleasant memory. It was a distraction, and like all distractions, it didn’t fit to think of it on a mission.

Even if it hurt.

Marie leaned back on her side, letting comfort take her back into a somnambulant state of being. The Gwans had nice pillows, and a nice quilt, and a nice balance of heat to cold in a house with a weak furnace.

She could sleep this off.

Maybe, oh, tell Mayor Rose about what happened. Finagle a citizenship visa.

That could wait though. It had been too long since Marie could let her guard down around other beastmen and just… detense. Let all the stress knotted up in her body untangle itself. Even her tail had knots.

There was a sinking feeling that the padding down her front and the lipids clinging to her limbs were not going anywhere. Fat isn't genetic. It was a consequence of adipose. Unless her body found some way to burn fat in the process of changing back, it was stuck to her.

Oh well, she thought. I could use an excuse to exercise.

… or, a-ah… keep this weight on….

She weighed it sleepily, putting her paws down to her paunch and squeezing the loose flab. It was remarkably cozy. 

She could just lay here. Enjoy being an overstuffed tube of animal while it lasted.

No rush. No worries.

Her tail wagged lazily as she drifted off again, sprawling into the bedsheet, happy not to think about anything but her own comfort for a little while...


End file.
